


mundane yesterdays

by toomoon (jjjat3am)



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: M/M, Trope Subversion/Inversion, but also only kind of, but only kind of, hospital au, superhero au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-17
Updated: 2019-07-17
Packaged: 2020-06-29 04:30:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19822570
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jjjat3am/pseuds/toomoon
Summary: The one where Yuta is a nurse and Taeil is his injury-prone new neighbor.or, alternatively, there's a crime-fighting vigilante terrorizing criminals on the streets of Seoul and Yuta's got a feeling where his neighbor's mysterious bruises are coming from.





	mundane yesterdays

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to Mina for holding my hand through this whole process. I wouldn't have ever made this without you. Also huge thanks to Idella for doing the beta work, and trusting in me that this would be good.
> 
> Please check the end notes for additional warnings.

  
  


There’s something so strange about dawn after a night without sleep. The streets are too bright and too loud, even in the early hours, and Yuta is grateful to be able to shut his eyes as he leans against the window of the subway car, fighting not to doze off and miss his stop. 

Yuta likes being a nurse but the night shift wears him down sometimes. All the awful cases seem to come in under cover of darkness and he’s starting to feel a little disconnected from friends with ordinary schedules.

He stumbles a little up the stairs to his apartment building. His post box is empty, but he’s mostly opened it on automatic anyway. The elevator makes weird noises under his weight, but he’s too busy fantasizing about his warm soft bed to really worry about it.

He gives an absent-minded nod to a neighbor, who’s struggling to open the door to his apartment under the weight of a number of boxes. There's a huge plant perched on top of the pile in an equally huge glass vase and it catches Yuta's eye for a moment with its healthy green leaves, before he's back to focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. 

His key scrapes loudly in his lock and the sound feels grating.

There's a loud shattering noise behind him, and a yelp. Yuta turns around. The boxes are scattered on the floor around his neighbor and the potted plant is on the floor. The vase is broken. There's blood.

Yuta's world snaps into sharp focus, honed by years of experience as an ER nurse. He's across the hall in a few steps, reaching into his bag for a first aid kit, grabbing for the man’s arm, noting his wide and terrified eyes.

"It's okay," he says, as soothingly as he can, "I'm a nurse, I can fix it."

The neighbor allows him to take his hand. From then on, it's routine. Yuta removes the small shards of glass from the man’s palm with a pair of tweezers and holds it still through applying the disinfectant. The man makes a quiet sound of pain and Yuta mutters soft nonsense under his breath until the sting passes.

The wound doesn't even need stitches. He makes sure the bleeding has stopped and wraps it carefully.

"You'll have to avoid putting pressure on it and you can take the bandage off tomorrow," Yuta says and looks up, finally noticing the unfamiliar face. "I'm Yuta, by the way. I live in 375."

He smiles and the other man smiles back, a little shaky. "Thank you," he says. "I'm Taeil. I'm new."

Yuta helps Taeil unlock his new apartment and carries in his boxes, despite his protests. By now, the commotion has attracted a number of their elderly neighbors, who coo concernedly over Taeil and Yuta by extension. Mrs. Ong offers to sweep the mess and Mrs. Kim decides they will both be recipients of her famous kimchi stew. Taeil is introduced to all of them and is unable to protest the outpouring of care.

Yuta leaves him settled in between the boxes of his apartment, looking a little shell shocked. He only just makes it through the door of his apartment, collapsing into the bed still fully clothed, adrenaline finally wearing off.

  
  


*

  
  


Yuta wakes up after seven hours of dreamless sleep. It doesn’t feel like enough but at this point, he’s been functioning on too little for so long he doesn’t even remember what enough is. He stumbles towards the kitchen counter, muttering thanks to the dark curtains that are doing an admirable job of blocking out the light. It’s early afternoon, or there around. He doesn’t have to be at work until tomorrow morning and the thought makes him almost dizzy with relief.

Well, relief or hunger; he’s not sure which. He turns on the hot water kettle and spoons some instant rice into a bowl. 

Yuta washes his hands and his face, going through the rest of his skincare routine on autopilot. He tries to keep up with it when it can. He takes a certain amount of pride in having nice skin.

He doesn’t really have a table, just a desk, so he eats on his bed, careful not to spill anything as he shoves food into his mouth, watching an old  _ One Piece _ episode. His brain isn’t totally booted up yet. It stays in a hazy sort of middle ground, where he doesn’t have to think of much except satisfying his immediate needs.

It’s not until he catches sight of his backpack, propped against the front door, that reality, as well as the events of the previous night (or more accurately, morning), come flooding back.

One of the first aid kits is ripped open, the contents scattered. There’s a whole stack of them, stuffing his backpack full. They’re expired so the hospital can’t use them anymore and after the head nurse had done inventory, the staff were free to grab as many as they could carry. Some of the content was outdated, especially the medication, but the bandages were still good and the kits were useful to have around. Yuta had planned on sweeping them for anything harmful and then giving them to his neighbors. He couldn’t always be around to fix up oven burns or scrapes from grandchildren playing too roughly.

Yuta crouches over his bag, bowl balanced precariously in his palm. Through the missing pieces of the kit, he tries to reconstruct the wound he fixed up that morning in the hallway. The latex gloves are missing, which was an excellent sign that Yuta remembered to keep to the disinfection procedure. A couple of packets of gauze are gone too, as is an ace bandage. The pair of tweezers have dried blood on them, which means he’ll have to take them back to the hospital to disinfect properly. 

He remembers there being broken glass and cleaning out the wound. That could be tricky. It means he’ll definitely have to check up on his neighbor today, at some point. He was going to anyway, but glass could make a mess, and likely the man wouldn’t think to go to the doctor to get it checked out. They never did.

Try as he might, Yuta can’t really recall the man’s face or his name. Just his hands, the surprisingly delicate fingers that hid a very strong grip. He finds himself hoping that he did a good enough job for the skin to heal back normally. It’d be a shame if they scarred.

The sound of a knock slices through his thoughts. By the time he makes it to the door, there’s a plastic bag with an alluring smell coming from it hanging off his doorknob and the door to Mrs. Kim's apartment is already swinging shut. Yuta smiles at the bag. Mrs. Kim cooking is delicious, but she doesn't like handing it over and being praised and thanked for it. 

He notices that his neighbor has a matching bag on his doorknob. As he watches, the door swings open and Yuta doesn’t look away quickly enough to avoid the pair of eyes peeking through.

In hindsight, he must have been very out of it that morning, if he managed to forget that kind of face.

“Hi,” Yuta says, schooling his expression into a smile that hopefully looks welcoming. “You got a care package from Mrs. Kim too. She makes excellent kimchi stew. Even makes her own kimchi from scratch.”

“Oh,” Taeil says, blinking quizzically at the plastic bag. “I just heard a knock.”

“She’s like that,” Yuta says, grinning at the thought of his old lady neighbors, “she doesn’t like it when you compliment her. When you thank her, try to make sure you do it by letting her overhear it and not directly. She can be really shy.”

“I’ll remember that,” Taeil says, flashing him a small smile. He picks up to pick up the bag, angling his body out the door and giving Yuta a glimpse of his injured hand. The bandages are already starting to fray and unravel, yellow in some places. Yuta winces. 

“I should probably change your bandage now,” Yuta says. Taeil looks at him, surprised, then seems to remember his injury too, immediately turning embarrassed.

“You don’t have to! I inconvenienced you in the first place, I don’t want to take any more of your time -”

Yuta shakes his head and interrupts. “I’m a nurse, it’s my job. I see much worse things on a daily basis.”

“Oh,” Taeil blinks, “okay. If you’re sure. I mean, you know best.”

“And don’t you forget it,” Yuta says, grinning, coaxing a shy smile out of Taeil.

There is a brief logistical problem, where Yuta doesn’t want to push into Taeil’s apartment but also doesn’t want to invite the hot new neighbor to witness the mess that long tiring hours had made of his apartment. He solves it by bringing out a chair into the hallway, along with a fresh medkit.

It isn’t so easy to slip into his work mindset this time. Taeil’s hands are warm but not sweaty, his palms wide and fingers well formed, nails cut short. The cuts from the glass stand out in stark contrast against his tanned skin, but at least nothing seems infected or too damaged.

“Sorry, I’m hurting you,” Yuta says, gently unwinding the bandages, especially careful where they’d gotten stuck to the scabs. Some break open and start bleeding sluggishly, and Yuta carefully cleans them again.

“It doesn’t hurt,” Taeil claims, visibly hiding a wince at the sting. Yuta tamps down a smile. 

In an effort to distract him, he tries to make conversation. “So, you know what I do for a living,” he says. “What about you?”

“Well, I-” Taeil starts but doesn’t finish, because Mrs. Kim chooses that moment to poke her head through her front door and start fussing over them and Yuta never gets to hear his answer.

  
  


*

  
  


“Oh, gosh, what happened?” Yuta exclaims, hurrying down the hallway to meet Taeil at his door. They often meet like this in the mornings - Yuta, sleep deprived and returning, and Taeil, also sleep deprived but leaving.

“It’s nothing,” Taeil says, ducking his head as if that would somehow hide the massive dark bruise around his eye from Yuta’s prying eyes. “I ran into a door yesterday. It’s not as bad as it looks.”

“It looks terrible,” Yuta says sternly, carefully pressing his fingers into the darkened skin. Taeil hisses from the pain, sending him a betrayed look. “Yeah, you’re not going to work like this, especially in this weather.”

The weather had been almost unbearable the past couple of days, temperatures climbing and the sun high in the sky. Combined with the humidity it made for a rising amount of patients admitted with heat stroke and exhaustion.

“But I have to work!” Taeil says though he doesn’t resist when Yuta grabs his wrist and tugs him towards his apartment. 

“You can call in sick,” Yuta says, firmly. “I’ll have a doctor friend write you a note. And you’re coming in to work with me to get that checked out by an expert. I don’t like the look of it.”

He already has someone in mind.

Johnny isn’t a real eye doctor yet because he still has to finish his specialization but he’s good at his job and Yuta trusts his opinion. Besides, Johnny owes him a favor for all the times that Yuta extolled his virtues to Taeyong. Not that he really needed to, since Taeyong has been gone for the handsome young doctor as soon as he came onto the team a few months ago, but it was the principle of the thing.

Taeil grumbles a bit under his breath, but he lets himself be pushed into the chair at Yuta’s desk, looking around curiously at Yuta’s studio apartment. There isn’t much to see, just a room, with a small kitchen to one side, the door to the bathroom on the other. The aforementioned desk is taking up prime real estate under the windowsill, where Yuta’s houseplants are dying a slow and water-deprived death. Taking up a huge chunk of the room is Yuta’s one luxury in life - his big soft bed, with crisp linen sheets. He can hear its siren’s call even now and has to force himself to focus on the task at hand.

He takes out a cold pack and wraps it carefully in a clean dish towel so that the cold won’t be too harsh on Taeil’s face. When he turns around, he catches Taeil looking at the bed with a strange expression. His bruise seems even darker in the dim light coming through Yuta’s curtains and he frowns, worried.

“Maybe it’d be better if you laid down,” Yuta says, and Taeil jumps, eyes snapping to his. “Are you feeling feverish? You look a little flushed.”

He does look a little red, and he makes a soft noise under his breath when Yuta puts his palm on his forehead to check his temperature.

"Did that hurt?" Yuta asks, concerned. 

"No," Taeil croaks out, "just around my eye."

Yuta leans over to look at his eye. Was he imagining it, or was there some red bleeding into the sclera?

Taeil flinches back and Yuta gives him an apologetic smile. "I'm sorry," he says, "my breath must smell really bad, right?"

Taeil shakes his head frantically enough that he looks a bit queasy after. "No, you smell really nice," he says and Yuta ducks his head to hide his smile.

"Keep saying things like that and I'll start worrying that you've got a concussion too," he says. 

He ushers Taeil out of the apartment and then down to the subway stop, which is thankfully near their apartment building. It’s outside of rush hour and the train is blessedly cool after the heat outside. 

They get some strange looks from the other passengers, Taeil with his eye and Yuta pressing the cold compress to it. Halfway through the train ride, Yuta realizes he'd been rubbing Taeil's back with his free hand. He makes himself stop.

Walking up to the hospital during time off is a profoundly strange experience. A part of him immediately goes on high alert, cataloging the state of the ER waiting room. Another part of him is entirely focused on details that usually fade into the background, like the chipping paint on the walls and the too-harsh lights. 

He’s clutching at Taeil's hand. He doesn't even know when he grabbed it.

Donghyuck, the sweet sunny nurse manning the front desk looks up and does a double take.

"Yuta?" he asks. "Are you doing double shifts again?"

Donghyuck's eyes travel from Yuta's face, to where he’s still holding Taeil's hand. If possible, they get even wider. Yuta drops Taeil's hand as if burned, but it’s too late.

"Or are you here for your...friend?" The meaningful pause lets Yuta know that the rumor is going to be all over the hospital in a few hours. Donghyuck is efficient and sweet, with a core of steel, but he’s also an incorrigible gossip and Yuta immediately resigns himself to veiled questions about his supposed boyfriend for at least the whole of next week, or until something new enters the hospital gossip mill.

“My neighbor,” Yuta says with careful emphasis, pointing towards Taeil’s eye, “had a bit of an accident. I’m worried that there might be some excess bleeding. The bruise has gotten pretty big.”

It seems to have gotten even bigger, the purpling extending down past Taeil’s delicate cheekbone. Donghyuck makes a sound of understanding and busies himself with searching for Taeil’s medical insurance. As luck would have it, Johnny bustles past in that exact same moment and Yuta snags his sleeve before he strides off down the corridor towards whatever important business doctors are always doing.

He explains the situation again. “Can you take a look at my friend, please?”, he says, nudging Taeil forward.

Johnny nods and gives them one of his charming smiles, the one that usually causes Taeyong to stumble over his own Crocs and also leaves Yuta a little bit weak-kneed every time. Next to him, Taeil seems similarly affected, blinking at thin air with a dazed look on his face, though that could also be a symptom of a concussion.

“I’ll take him in before we open the office, no problem,” Johnny says, as Donghyuck hands him a folder. He gestures for Taeil to follow him and strides down the hallway, already asking him questions in that probing tone that all doctors seem to master. Taeil only turns around once, giving Yuta a lost look as his shorter legs struggle to keep up with Johnny’s pace.

Yuta gives him a thumbs up and immediately regrets it, cringing at how cheesy he’s being. Still, Taeil seems comforted as he disappears behind a corner. 

“Wow, that was terrible,” Donghyuck mutters and Yuta immediately turns to glare at him, fully intending to threaten him into staying quiet about the encounter. Before he can, he gets interrupted by a voice.

“Yuta? Did I accidentally schedule you for a double shift? You know you’re supposed to tell me if that happens! You’re working too much as it is,” Taeyong says, and Yuta turns around to find him frowning. 

He spares a moment to be grateful that Johnny just left, otherwise, they’d all be subjected to their frankly terrible flirting. Yuta loves them both, but that’s a hard pass.

“Working too much? This coming from the biggest workaholic I know,” Yuta says, smiling. He considers Taeyong a good friend, even if they’re the same age and the other man is already his superior. “I’m just here with a neighbor, who ran into a door. There was some bruising and bleeding in the eye. I thought that having Johnny check it out would be a good idea.”

“Oh,” Taeyong says, expression softening at the mention of Johnny’s name. “Is it someone from your granny harem?”

Yuta’s neighbors are a well-known fact around the hospital because he sometimes brings the excess dessert they make to share in the break room.

“He didn’t seem old enough for that,” Donghyuck says in an undertone. “In fact, he seemed pretty young and virile-”

Yuta slams his hand on top of the counter and glares at him. Donghyuck snaps his mouth shut and gives him an innocent smile. Taeyong looks between them and then seems to decide to ignore their antics. 

“Right,” Taeyong says. “Actually, you were lucky that you got off shift when you did. Half an hour into ours we had an influx of patients from some sort of back-alley brawl. There was police with them and everything. A lot of broken bones and concussions.”

“A back-alley brawl?” Yuta asks, incredulous. “In Seoul?”

“Yeah,” Taeyong shrugs, shifting his weight. He’s wearing his rainbow-colored Crocs today, which means he’s probably overseeing the pediatrics ward. “And get this - one of the officers told me it was one guy that broke up the fight. He was gone by the time the police got there, but apparently, he’s some sort of vigilante or something.”

Donghyuck drops his clipboard and it clatters loudly on the ground.

“Huh, weird,” Yuta says. “I hope they don’t send any more patients our way. Are you okay?”

The last thing is directed at Donghyuck, who appears to be choking on his own saliva. “Fine,” he says in a strangled voice. Yuta exchanges a glance with Taeyong, who just shrugs.

“Anyway,” Taeyong says, his voice turning gentle, “I’m taking you off the night shifts for a while. It’ll give you a chance to adjust to normal human life.”

“I don’t mind working night shifts,” Yuta says, even though he hates them, “it gives everyone with families a break from having to do them. I’m single, so it doesn’t matter that much.”

“They’re not good for you,” Taeyong says, in a tone that doesn’t allow for argument. Yuta just shrugs and accepts it, having to hide a smile despite himself. 

Truthfully, he’s still thinking about Taeil’s bruised eye, and how it could have just as easily been caused by a fist. And there was still the case of his still-mysterious job to consider. He never did get his answer about that. Yuta resigns himself to observing for now. If his new neighbor is, in fact, a crime-fighting vigilante in disguise, then well - that’s kind of sexy, to be honest.

  
  


*

  
  


In the following month, Taeil comes knocking on Yuta’s door with a variety of injuries - cuts that need stitches and cuts that don’t, concussions, scraped knuckles, burns, and bruises that span the length of his torso (from which Yuta learns that his neighbor is in pretty good shape). None of them consistently point to an unorthodox lifestyle, but Yuta is suspicious, especially about the ones that are followed by a slew of criminally-inclined patients at their hospital. Taeil, of course, has convenient excuses for all of them, but some of them are so outlandish that Yuta has a hard time believing him (who steps on a rake and gets a concussion in this day and age, honestly?).

Meanwhile, the mysterious crime fighter is getting a bit of a reputation for breaking up sex trafficking rings, protecting women from sexual assault and laying out a few elusive drug dealers. An already safe city feels even safer with him around. He gets a slightly stupid nickname, something like ‘Idol Hero’ from when one woman he saved claimed she saw his face and that he looked, quote, “handsome like an idol!”. 

Taeil is certainly handsome enough to earn that moniker.

Donghyuck, in particular, is weirdly obsessed with the Idol Hero. There are all these articles he clips out and keeps in his locker, or at the counter, and he knows all about the vigilante’s whereabouts, which means that consequently, Yuta knows about them too. 

And he gets worried. If it really is Taeil doing all of those things and saving all of those people, that’s admirable, but it also means that he’s constantly putting himself in danger. A danger that might give him an injury that Yuta couldn’t fix with a bandaid and a warm smile.

Since moving to the morning shift, Yuta is still sleep deprived, but at least his schedule is roughly the same as Taeil’s schedule. So he starts inviting him to dinner. Only in order to check up on him or catch him slipping up about his lifestyle choices though, of course. 

The problem is that Yuta is, in fact, a terrible cook that can barely make a meal of instant ramen, so Taeil takes over the cooking. He’s just marginally better, but at least he doesn’t consistently set off the smoke alarm. It gives Yuta a chance to clean and do laundry and talk to another human being about something that isn’t IV fluids or weird injuries.

He buys a little foldout table and chairs, so they actually have somewhere to sit and put their dishes as they eat. It occurs to him, more than once, that sharing meals like this is somewhat romantic, but he shuts down that train of thought very quickly. Taeil is a good friend. The only one he’s made outside of work in a long time. Yuta doesn’t want to fuck that up, especially when Taeil looks at him in the dim candlelight, his smile both shy and inviting.

Yuta finds himself doing most of the talking. Taeil never talks much, but he’s a good listener, making noises in all the right places. The first few times he finds that he’s chattered the evening away, Yuta tries to apologize. Taeil waves him off.

“I like listening to you,” he says, making Yuta flush. He almost kisses him then, in the square of his own doorway, his voice hoarse and his heart light in his chest. Then, Mrs. Ong comes bustling out with a trash bag and the moment is gone.

It’s during this time that Yuta gets a glimpse into Taeil’s apartment. There’s no dark spandex suit in sight (which means nothing - Taeil could be keeping it in his closet, where Yuta doesn’t check). There is, however, an unusually high number of house plants. They’re everywhere - crowding the floor and the counter, and hanging from the ceiling. There are even some tiny tomatoes in a windowbox that Yuta makes appropriately cooing noises over. Taeil seems to light up when he talks about plants, and he talks more than usual. It’s endearing.

Yuta’s sad little house plants have been thriving since he started inviting Taeil over. He suspects that Taeil has been watering them in secret, but he can never catch him in the act.

  
  


*

  
  


A teacher Yuta had in nursing school once said that it was the hardest to work on people you loved. It seemed weird to him at that time - surely if it was someone you loved that was in mortal danger, it would motivate you to work that much harder to save them. 

He doesn’t really understand what that teacher meant until a patient gets brought into the ER via ambulance and it’s Taeil.

  
  


*

  
  


It’s the second day of  _ Chuseok _ and Yuta is covering the night shift. It seemed the right thing to do, to switch with a coworker who’s facing a long commute home to celebrate with her family. It’s not like Yuta celebrates the holiday. It does make him think about his own family and how long he’s gone without seeing them. 

It’s not exactly that he misses them on a daily basis, but keeping up with phone calls is exhausting (especially dodging the inevitable questions about why he’s not working as a nurse in Japan, earning a comparable salary and staying closer to his family). It’s more like he misses what and who he used to be, in a nostalgic longing for when he was younger and things felt easier.

Someone’s bought an assortment of  _ hangwa  _ to share in the break room. They sit heavy in Yuta’s stomach, the sweetness coating his tongue. He hasn’t eaten much else. Taeil is visiting his family too, so Yuta is stuck eating instant ramen. He didn’t realize how much he’s gotten to depend on Taeil’s cooking to get him through the day and how comfortable that’s become. When he comes back, Yuta will have to break that habit. It’s not healthy for him to grow so dependent on his neighbor.

Actually, Taeil’s family lives somewhere near Yuta’s hospital. He can almost imagine them, hazy images gathered around a table, sharing food and laughing. Taeil has a beautiful laugh. Or maybe, they’re all already asleep. It’s late, past midnight. Yuta didn’t realize it would be this hard to go back to staying up this late. He’s used to the morning shift now.

Yuta takes a sip of his cold coffee. It contrasts unpleasantly with the sweetness in his mouth. Beside him, Donghyuck is yawning and rubbing at his eyes. He’s stuck here too, too sweet to deny the request of a coworker with children and a husband waiting for her.

It’s been a quiet night so far. A car accident with only minimal injuries. A child with candy stuck up their nose, the mother looking both harried and amused. Some food-related incidents - it’s surprising how many people end up choking on holiday food they aren’t used to having.

An alarm goes off. Break time is over and there’s another patient headed their way. Yuta slides off the hospital bed that he’s been sitting on. Next to him, Donghyuck does the same, walking over to the computer to look at the details from the emergency dispatcher.

“A robbery victim,” Donghyuck reads off the screen, “that’s not that common anymore…”

“...especially since Idol Hero’s been around,” Yuta finishes for him with a smile. Donghyuck flushes but waves him off.

“Possible broken arm, multiple lacerations,” Donghyuck says. Yuta nods, absently, calling for the on-duty doctor to come to wake up from the nap he’s taking in the break room. He snaps on his gloves and lets the routine take over, slipping into a ready mindset.

The emergency room doors open with a loud ping and the paramedics burst in. The space becomes full of barely controlled chaos and despite everything the job entails, Yuta thrives in this environment. He calls for Donghyuck, directs the paramedics and then he catches his first good look at the patient.

Time slows down, then stops. It’s Taeil laid out in the hospital bed, pale, except where his skin is marred with bruises and smudges of drying blood. Yuta is aware that he’s moving and that he’s saying something, but he doesn’t know what it is, except that he’s shouldered past the paramedic to stand next to the bed.

Taeil opens his eyes. Slowly and painfully, his mouth twitches up in a smile filled with so much trust and relief that something in Yuta’s chest shatters open.

Then, Donghyuck is pulling him away from Taeil with gentle hands and Jaehyun is taking over the situation as if it’s nothing out of the ordinary, barking orders at nurses that Yuta can barely recognize, and Yuta finds himself in the waiting room, clutching a phone and Taeyong’s sleep-rough worried voice in his ear.

“Taeil is hurt,” he tells Taeyong, who’s making soft shushing noises on his end of the phone. “He’s hurt.”

  
  


*

It only takes an hour, but it feels like days until they let Yuta see Taeil. Jaehyun is adjusting his IV line when Yuta bursts into the room. 

Jaehyun gives him a significant look that Yuta can't really interpret before sweeping out the door.

"Don't keep him up too long," Jaehyun says quietly as he passes him. "He has a concussion."

Taeil is awake. He smiles, weakly, when Yuta looks at him. The bruises are dark against his skin, contrasting with the pristine white of the cast on his left arm.

"Hi," Taeil croaks out in a voice that sounds absolutely wrecked and twists sharp daggers in Yuta's heart. "Here I am again."

"Here you are," Yuta agrees, trying to stop his head from thinking of alternatives. "What happened?"

Taeil winces. "I was walking to the apartment. I took a shortcut through a dark alley and these guys jumped me. I fell backward. I think I hit my head on the pavement."

"Fuck," Yuta swears, feeling broken. His knees feel shaky, so he sits down in the chair next to Taeil's bed.

Taeil sounds far away, as if he's reliving the moment again, and bile burns sharply in the back of Yuta's throat. 

He reaches out to push a stray hair out of Taeil's face. That seems to clear some of the fog away from Taeil's eyes. Before Yuta can take his hand away, Taeil leans his cheek on it, expression softening.

His cheek should hurt since it's still bruised but a glance up to the IV bag lets Yuta know that Jaehyun put Taeil on the good painkillers. He shouldn't be feeling much of anything at all. He lets his fingers uncoil so he's cupping Taeil's cheek properly.

"What were you even doing there?" Yuta asks. "I thought you were going to spend the night at your parents’."

Taeil looks exhausted, under eye circles almost as dark as the bruises. Yuta's heart aches at the thought that Taeil could have been out on the streets by choice, putting himself in danger for some ideal of justice or whatever it was that drew Taeil to the vigilante path.

Taeil makes a barely audible noise against Yuta's palm. After that brief moment of lucidity, he seems to be fading fast.

"You can tell me anything, you know that, right?" Yuta adds, dread pooling in his stomach. It takes him a moment to realize that Taeil is asleep.

He stays like that for a while, cupping Taeil's cheek, just thinking. Once he's sure that Taeil has fallen deeply asleep, he extracts his hand, checks his monitors and his IV lines, and flips through his chart, and then heads out.

The door shuts behind him with a quiet click, hiding Taeil's peacefully sleeping face.

Yuta wanders the hallways of the hospital, deep in thought.

There are a couple of things he knows. One is that Taeil is apparently willing to put his life in grave danger on a daily basis. Two is that tonight's injury is very unlikely to deter him from doing that again. Three is that Taeil may never trust Yuta with his secret And four is that even if Taeil does tell Yuta or comes to him with another injury, Yuta might not be able to help him.

Hot embarrassment floods Yuta's stomach at the thought of how he'd frozen tonight. He takes a lot of pride in his skills as a nurse, in his quick and calm reactions. Yet all it takes is Taeil so awfully injured, the sight of someone he loves-

Oh.

Well, fuck. Yuta is an idiot. Of course, he's gone and fallen for his handsome and injury prone neighbor. 

What is worse is that Yuta is pretty sure that Taeil isn't indifferent to him either. In fact, there have been several moments over the past few weeks where he'd been sure that Taeil had been waiting to kiss him, and Yuta had only hesitated because of the big secret lying between them.

Yuta notices that he's come up to a fire escape door. Some fresh air sounds nice. Anything to escape the thoughts currently swirling in his head. Yuta pushes the door open -

\- and almost walks right into Donghyuck. 

Donghyuck, who's dragging a body behind him.

"This isn't what it looks like," Donghyuck says.

"It looks like you're dragging a body through a barely used fire escape," Yuta says.

"Okay, so it's exactly what it looks like," Donghyuck says with a shrug. “Help me with him, will you? He's heavy."

The night has been weird as it stands, so what's one more thing to add to the list? Yuta grabs the man's legs, and he and Donghyuck carry him through the door and down the hallway.

There's something practiced in the way Donghyuck canvasses the hallways and chooses an empty examination room to duck into.

"You've been doing this a lot," Yuta notes. Donghyuck turns on the lights and he gets his first good look at the man they'd been carrying. He's wearing a dark spandex suit, not unlike the one he'd imagined Taeil wearing while out fighting crime. He's also wearing a mask.

"Yep," Donghyuck says, drawing Yuta's attention back to himself. "There's no telling what trouble this big lug would get into without me to patch him up."

Donghyuck strides over to the man and pulls his mask off. There's something tender in the way he smooths his hair down after and draws his fingers down the man's face to check for injury.

The face revealed is very handsome, and almost painfully young. Probably around Donghyuck's age, maybe younger.

"Donghyuck," Yuta says with steadily mounting realization, "is this Idol Hero?"

"Yep!" Donghyuck announces brightly. "Also, I think he needs stitches and yours are much more even than mine."

  
  


*

  
  


Yuta waits until Taeil is discharged from the hospital to finally come clean.

Taeil is fussing over his houseplants and how they've apparently degraded since he's been away. Yuta's been watering them but he obviously hasn't done a good enough job.

"I thought you were a superhero," Yuta blurts out as Taeil starts to coo at a small spider plant.

"A what?" Taeil replies, visibly confused.

"A superhero," Yuta says, stubbornly insistent.

"Why would you think that?" Taeil says, abandoning the plant to sit at the dining table across from Yuta.

"All your injuries!" Yuta bursts out, gesturing with his hands. "And your mysterious job! What else was I supposed to think?"

"Uh," Taeil says.

"What do you do for a living?" Yuta asks, little shamefaced. "I forgot to ask in the beginning and then it seemed weird because I knew everything else about you."

"Oh," Taeil says, tone considerably brighter. "I'm a gardener. I work outside most of the time. And the injuries just seem to appear."

"That's wonderful," Yuta says, softly.

"You really thought I could be a superhero?" Taeil asks a note of wonder in his voice.

Yuta shrugs, embarrassed. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," he says and ends up confessing the whole story, down to Donghyuck and his vigilante boyfriend, who Yuta now knows is called Mark and is from Canada, and wants to be a detective, actually.

Yuta doesn't know how he came to be living the crime-fighting vigilante lifestyle and honestly the less he knows about it the better.

"So," Taeil starts in the silence after Yuta's confession, "now that you know I'm not some superhero, that I'm just plain old Taeil, who gardens and gets injured a lot, has the interest worn off?"

The strange hesitance in his tone has Yuta snapping to attention. He stares at Taeil while mulling over his words. Thinking about Taeil, of their dinners that might as well have been dates and the breakfasts that feel so domestic that it aches a little. Of the trusting way, Taeil looked at him when Yuta patched him up, of his soft skin under his hands, his pulse fluttering rabbit quick. How he'd always feel so much smaller next to Yuta, but strong, build covered with wiry muscle. His face, his eyes, his mouth, the sound of his soft laughter.

“No,” Yuta says.

He doesn’t think he could ever not be interested in Taeil.

Yuta leans across the small table to cup Taeil’s cheek, as he did in the hospital when he’d been scared enough that he’d lost him to confront his feelings. Taeil leans into it, soft and trusting, eyes wide. Yuta uses his hand to guide him closer and leans forward, ignoring how the edge of the table digs into his stomach.

They kiss under the green canopy of Taeil’s houseplants. Yuta’s stomach gets a bruise from the table, and Taeil cuts his hand open on the edge of a cupboard in their haste to get to the bed, so Yuta has to hold a paper towel to it to stop the bleeding, but they don’t stop kissing.

  
  


*

  
  


There’s something almost strange about waking up at dawn in the arms of someone you love. The feeling of idyllic happiness doesn’t feel compatible with the aches in his body and the dry feeling in Yuta’s mouth. The harsh morning light has no right to bathe Taeil’s cheekbones in such vivid, glorious colors. Yuta stares at him for a moment, then turns towards the clock on the bedside table. 

There’s still time to sleep. They don’t have anywhere to be for a while, unless Mark has somehow gotten himself an injury that Donghyuck can’t fix alone. There’s been less of those lately though.

Taeil suddenly kicks in his sleep, catching his toe on the poster of the bed. He makes a soft, mournful sound and Yuta makes soothing noises until he settles again, hiding his laughter. 

Yuta settles himself more firmly around Taeil, to keep him from acquiring any more mysterious bruises, buries his head into his neck to hide from the sun and goes back to sleep.

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: because this is somewhat a hospital AU, there might be some graphic descriptions of injuries and mentions of blood. If you're sensitive to this kind of content, please approach this story with caution.
> 
> I'm not a medical professional so please take the procedures written here with a grain of salt.


End file.
